Marilyn French Quotes

I don't think we have to have a personal relation to a life lost to understand that something terrible has taken place, especially in the context of war.

I've never been to war, and I would never presume to fully understand the horrors that that kind of experience can impart.

In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.

Unity and self-sacrifice, of themselves, even when fostered by the most noble means, produce a facility for hating. Even when men league themselves mightily together to promote tolerance and peace on earth, they are likely to be violently intolerant toward those not of a like mind.

A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world.

War, hate, jealousy, racism - what are they but manifestations of fear?

This soldiering thing sadly deadens that very good thing, humanity.

A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.

No one is born with hate in their heart. Hate is something that has been taught. It is not an innate survival skill that we need; It is a form of stupidity that penetrates our minds and will eventually destroy us.

if you learn to hate one or two persons... you'll soon hate millions of people.

I believe that everyone can appreciate the right of a family to grieve the loss of a loved one in peace, regardless of anyone's position on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I know that war and mayhem run in our blood. I refuse to believe that they must dominate our lives. We humans are animals, too, but animals with amazing powers of rationality, morality, society. We can use our strength and courage not to savage each other, but to defend our highest purposes.

It could have been me. And just the hope and prayers that, you know, if, if the shoes were switched, that you know, Laci would do the same thing for me.

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.

Those who have experienced the most, have suffered so much that they have ceased to hate. Hate is more for those with a slightly guilty conscience, and who by chewing on old hate in times of peace wish to demonstrate how great they were during the war.

To all those who walk the path of human cooperation war must appear loathsome and inhuman.

We live in a world of guns, bombs and terror. To conquer hate seems a nigh-impossible task.

When you see a 14-year-old boy who has never known what peace looks like for a day in his life, there's part of you as a human being that feels some degree, you can say, compassion for the fact that these boys have known war, famine, violence and death from the day they were born.

We are all victims because of the circumstances, but I'm not sure what to say to any one who has lost a loved one. I know the feeling myself, and words just don't do much to ease the pain.

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.

At first I assumed hate was the opposite of love. But it isn't. The opposite of love is indifference.

When Christopher and Charles passed away, I was completely depressed, I felt rejected and real down, and so Roscoe invited me because he had this spirit of compassion, and we had gone to school together, were friends and everything.

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, 'Well, I've had it with humanity.' But I was wrong.

And after my mother's death I became more open to and empathetic about other people's struggles and losses.